Great list of iOS and Mac apps.

Focus is a beautiful and easy to use pomodoro timer. Built exclusively for iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Focus is the best way to focus on a single task for a period of time.

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management philosophy that aims to provide the user with maximum focus and creative freshness, thereby allowing them to complete projects faster with less mental fatigue.

The process is simple. For every project throughout the day, you budget your time into short increments and take breaks periodically. You work for 25 minutes, then take break for five minutes.

Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro”, named after the Italian word for tomato. Francesco Cirillo used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato as his personal timer, and thus the method’s name.

After four “pomodoros” have passed, (100 minutes of work time with 15 minutes of break time) you then take a 15-20 minute break.

Focus lets you enter and manage your task, work with customizable session length, see you completed tasks and incorporates the latest technologies. It helps you to focus on your tasks and stay productive all the time.

Focus is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with iOS 7 and also for OS X Mavericks.

This is cool. What a lot of work though.

Every year, thousands of people resolve to get organized in the new year. If you’re one of them, let Benjamin help. Benjamin is a task manager for iOS based on the FranklinCovey system of time management. Built specifically for those who love the Franklin Planner, Benjamin stores all your tasks, projects, and notes so they’re always at your fingertips. Best of all, Benjamin lets you sync your information between iPhone and iPad so that it’s conveniently available whether you’re at your desk or on the go.

Give yourself the tools you need to succeed in 2014. Give yourself Benjamin on the iPhone and iPad.

It’s been an incredible year for The Loop—we launched The Loop Magazine this year and the Web site is doing better than ever. I really couldn’t ask for anything more. […]

Take that Van Damme.

Yamaha Corporation and Line 6, Inc. today announced a definitive agreement for Yamaha to acquire Line 6, a leading manufacturer of innovative solutions for musicians. The acquisition expands Yamaha’s portfolio of modeling guitar processing products as well as pro-audio equipment, and offers new and exciting opportunities for accelerated growth for both companies.

Holy shit, that’s big news.

Great idea for a magazine on the iPhone. We are all photographers in some ways these days.

Nice little collection of apps at a discount.

Lessonator is a tool for creating beautiful music slideshow presentations on your Mac. It’s like a mashup between Apple’s Keynote and Garageband, where each slide is an animated music score. Lessonator creates and plays interactive slideshows containing 3d instruments, audio, video, notation (standard & tabs), images, diagrams and text. These slideshows are interactive because they can animate, ask questions, receive answers and track your musical progress.

Very cool looking app and a great idea.

In this issue Jim Dalrymple looks at how Apple is able to capture the essence of our lives and touch us with its TV ads; Darren Murph argues that it’s time for the phone number to die; Alex Vollmer tells us all about tube amps, including a wonderful video; Kirk McElhearn looks at collecting music and how it has changed; and Nathan Snelgrove explains how a $600 guitar means so much.

Jim and Dan talk about the new Mac Pro’s, the Universal Audio Apollo, Nokia’s latest commercial, how to get better at guitar without practicing, and more.

Sponsored by Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME1213 for 25% off), Hover (use code DANSENTME for 10% off), and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME12 for 10% off).

If you’re going to get a lens for your iPhone 5c, it might as well be a cool color. I’ve been meaning to try these lenses out.

Photos+ can replace the built-in Photos app for viewing, organizing, and sharing your pictures. It looks prettier, it has more sharing options, and it shows you more info about where, when, and how each photo was taken.

Nice looking app.

Clearly they post production did a great job replacing the igloo with a real house.

Kids, this is why you don’t do drugs while making a TV ad.

Lyve Minds’ answer to the problem is to recreate the cloud in your living room. The company’s apps will let phones, tablets and computers talk to each other and access personal media on each of them. Lyve supports iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS at launch, with plans to add more platforms down the road. The company’s apps will back up photos from a mobile device to other devices in the network, free up and reallocate space and always keep multiple copies of each file.

It will be interesting to see how Tim Bucher pulls this off.

Great tip from Gabe Weatherhead. I didn’t know you could do this.